Install and turn on tracking

Install Heatwave, approve its permissions, switch on the app embed and check that data is arriving.

Setting up Heatwave takes a few minutes and needs no code. Most stores see their first visits within five minutes.

1. Install Heatwave

Install Heatwave on your store. Shopify then asks you to approve the permissions the app needs.

The permissions, in plain words

Permission	Why Heatwave needs it
Read themes	To see which theme is live, whether the Heatwave app embed is switched on, and how your pages are divided into theme sections.
Read products	To show product names in the app instead of ID numbers.
Write pixels	To add Heatwave’s web pixel, which reports checkout steps.
Read customer events	To receive the checkout steps Shopify reports (checkout started, payment submitted, order completed). Checkout pages are never recorded.

Heatwave doesn’t ask to read your customers or orders.

2. Follow the setup guide

The first time you open Heatwave, a setup guide with four steps opens:

1. Turn on tracking. One switch in your theme.
2. Privacy & data. Choose how many visitors to measure, and add your storefront password if your store has one.
3. See your first visit. Check that data arrives.
4. You’re live. A summary of what happens next.

You can run the guide again any time from Settings > Help > Run the setup guide again.

3. Switch on the app embed

Heatwave runs as an app embed. It doesn’t change your theme files and you can switch it off from the same place.

1. In the setup guide (or in Settings > Tracking), click the button to open the theme editor.
2. In the theme editor, open App embeds.
3. Switch on Heatwave analytics.
4. Click Save.

The script is under 8 KB and loads after your page, so shoppers won’t notice it. It works with every Online Store 2.0 theme.

4. Choose how much to collect

In step 2 of the guide you pick one of three options:

• Automatic (recommended). As many visitors as your plan allows, spread over the whole month so data never stops early.
• Every consenting visitor. Tracks and records everyone until the plan limit is reached, then pauses until it resets.
• Heatmaps only. No session recordings. Heatmaps, behaviour patterns and recommendations still work.

You can change this later in Settings.

If your store is password protected (for example before launch), enter the storefront password here. This is the password shoppers type, not your admin login. Heatwave uses it to take the pictures of your pages that heatmaps are drawn on.

5. Check that data is arriving

1. Open your store in a private browser window.
2. Accept the cookie banner, if you have one.
3. Click around a few pages.

Step 3 of the setup guide checks every few seconds and shows “Data is arriving” with the number of page views and visits. You can also see the last visit received under Settings > Tracking.

No visits after a minute? See Troubleshooting.

When to expect results

What	When
First visits	Within seconds to a minute of a consenting visit
Heatmaps and Analytics	Fill in continuously as traffic comes in
Behaviour patterns	About 30 minutes after each visit ends
Store health score	After 30 visits in the selected period
AI recommendations	Once a page type has 200 views on a device

Heatmap patterns become reliable from about 20 visits to a page. Below that, Heatwave shows counts like “1 of 3” instead of percentages.